Homily for the Sunday of the Resurrection (Easter Sunday)
Readings: Acts 10:34, 37-43; Psalm 117 (118):1-2, 16-17, 22-23; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-9
9 April 2023
Happy Easter.
For us Christians, Easter is the time of year when all aspects of the human condition come into sharp focus. The gospel accounts of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus have it all.
During this Holy Week, we have witnessed the fickleness of the crowd: waving palms supportively on Palm Sunday and demanding his crucifixion days later. The wavering of the disciples: pledging support, Peter’s denying him, falling asleep at the hour of crisis, and Judas’s betrayal. The risk avoidance of the authorities: hanging the blame on the crowd, handballing him between the religious and state authorities, culminating in Pilate’s perennial question: ‘What is truth?’ The courage, concern for others, forgiveness, and abandonment of Jesus: ‘Do not weep for me; weep rather for yourselves and for your children’; ‘Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do’; ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
LISTEN: https://soundcloud.com/frank-brennan-6/easter-homily-2023
After three days, there come the revelations and declarations of hope and new life. There’s today’s gospel when the disciple whom Jesus loved entered into the tomb ‘and he saw and believed’. Then later, on the road to Emmaus, two disciples declared: ‘Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked to us on the road and explained the scriptures to us?’
Even for those not Christian, and even for those Christians still to be convinced about any notion of life after death, the accounts of Jesus’ last days resonate with what any person living the examined life needs to consider: the search for hope and meaning amidst human perfidy, greed, natural disaster, individual diminishment and death; and the search for truth amidst doubt, uncertainty, complicity, and evil.
This Easter, the nation mourns the death of Yunupingu – rightly hailed as an Aboriginal leader to the nation who lived successfully in two worlds. Every one of us lives in different worlds – the public and private, the material and the spiritual, both the here and now, as well as the abiding past and future. It’s only by inhabiting diverse worlds that we can apportion consistent sense and ultimate purpose to our present world of balance sheets and opinion polls. Marcia Langton hailed Yunupingu as a leader who taught her that ‘truth burns’. We post-moderns doubt the reality of truth – truth other than a human construct, truth other than the public consensus, truth other than the woke affirmation of the moment. Truth is the necessary bridge between our two worlds. The Jesting Pilate asked the key question: ‘What is truth?’
I recall the clear autumn sky, the brisk Canberra air and the bright sunlight when Queen Elizabeth opened the new Parliament House during the bicentenary. I was standing in the forecourt with Yunupingu. There were hundreds of protesters with Aboriginal flags, calling for land rights. This was four years before the High Court affirmed the existence of those rights. The previous evening, Yunupingu had dined at Government House with the Queen. He was at home in these two worlds. The truth of land rights was still a political slogan.
The late Robert Ellicott once told me about his role in the first land rights case decided by Justice Blackburn back in 1971. The case had commenced before Ellicott became Solicitor-General. Usually, the Solicitor-General would not appear in a case before a single judge of the Northern Territory Supreme Court. But Ellicott thought the case warranted his attention. He told me:
‘I come from a Methodist background. So this case is about an Aboriginal community at Yirrkala. Some of them are Methodists and some of them have been trained as Methodist local preachers. There’s a fellow there called Yunupingu, aged 19, who was to act as interpreter. He had learnt good English at bible college. This to me is an unusual case, so I’m not going to reject it. And I decide to take it on. I don’t think I had any confirmed views about Crown land or who owned the land. Except, I was a property lawyer and I knew the history of Australia and its land law. My initial reaction was: if the land has been claimed by the Crown then all interests have been subsumed to it.’
In late 1970, the court hearings moved to Canberra. Ellicott spoke about one weekend during the Canberra hearings when, knowing most of the plaintiffs were Methodist, he enquired of their barrister, Sir Edward Woodward, if he could ask them to join him at the service in the National Methodist Church and then take them to his Canberra home for lunch. Woodward agreed and they came. After lunch, they sat around the open fire and started chanting traditional songs in their own language. Yunupingu had a fine voice and joined in singing old Methodist hymns as well. Ellicott delighted in the observation, ‘It’s not every Solicitor-General who appeared for a defendant Commonwealth would be able to say that he sat down and sang hymns with Aboriginal plaintiffs after taking them to Church and inviting them to his home, or that Yunupingu as interpreter was there singing gospel songs as well as his own traditional songs.’
Ellicott and Yunupingu straddled two worlds together. They were searchers for truth, the truth that burns. This Easter, we all contemplate how best to accommodate within our Constitution those who rightly claim a heritage of 60,000 years uninterrupted custodianship of this land. As ever, all aspects of the human condition are in play. We hope for new life and a fresh start in our polity.
R: This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad.
Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good,
for his mercy endures forever.
Let the house of Israel say,
“His mercy endures forever.”
R: This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad.
The stone which the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone.
By the LORD has this been done;
it is wonderful in our eyes.
R: This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad.
Happy Easter!
Fr Frank Brennan SJ is the Rector of Newman College, Melbourne, and the former CEO of Catholic Social Services Australia (CSSA). He was appointed a peritus at the Fifth Plenary Council of the Australian Catholic Church. Fr Frank’s latest book is An Indigenous Voice to Parliament: Considering a Constitutional Bridge, Garratt Publishing, 2023.
Part of this homily appeared in the Australian Financial Review, ‘The Easter Truths that connect us all’, ‘5-6 April 2023 at https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/the-easter-truths-that-connect-us-all-20230403-p5cxqd.
